Modern product managers who have embraced agile methodology for new product and feature development rely on a diverse range of channels to acquire customer feedback. Some of the most popular tools include surveys, customer interviews, and feature requests by users. However, one of the most insightful approaches to quantify customer sentiment is through NPS®.
Let’s take a detailed look at how product teams USE NPS® to prioritize features.
What is NPS®?
NPS® stands for Net Promoter Score. It is an assessment indicator that demonstrates your customers’ loyalty. The metric doesn’t only quantify customer feedback and reviews but also provides an evaluation structure to product managers enabling them to make informed decisions.
The underlying concept of the Net Promoter Score system is that no other type of marketing is more important and valuable than word of mouth. That’s why it is crucial for brands to gauge how their customers feel about their products.
The best feature of NPS® is that it provides businesses with quantitative tools such as customer satisfaction surveys that allow product managers to collect measurable feedback with greater precision.
Businesses develop their own benchmarks to assess how their products perform. They also have the option to compare NPS® values of different products to identify the most successful ones.
Another impressive feature of NPS® is that it also empowers product teams to be on the same page and narrow down new features that they need to prioritize. The net promoter system allows the product team to serve their existing customers in a more effective manner as they add the right features with optimized use of company resources.
How Does NPS® Work?
Although there are different ways to create a survey, the NPS® survey boils down to a single question: “How likely are you to recommend our product or service to someone you know?”
The root of the survey is to identify the number of customers who are willing to recommend your product to a friend or family member. This factor alone is sufficient enough to measure your product’s success. Here’s how the net promoter system works:
- All your customer feedback is collected through The product team collects all customer feedback through the NPS®.
- Once the product leaders have a large enough sample size of valuable insights, they categorize NPS® scores into the following three groups:
- Customers who score 9 or 10 are Promoters
- Customers who give a score of 7 or 8 are Passives
- Customers who score lower than 7 are Detractors
The team determines the final NPS® score by subtracting the percentage of total Detractors from the percentage of total Promoters. For instance, if you have collected feedback through NPS® surveys from 200 customers and you have 100 promoters, 60 passives, and 40 detractors, then to calculate NPS®, the formula is:
% of promoters – % of detractors
(100/200)*100 – (40/200)*100
50% – 20%
+30% is your overall NPS® score
As a product manager, you have to keep in mind that the NPS® score isn’t just a number. In fact, it reflects if your product delivers customer value and whether you are successful in building a desirable customer experience.
In case the user feedback and NPS® data are not favorable, there is no need to panic as you have the option to conduct market research and acquire more comprehensive product feedback to deliver more value.
The insights make up for valuable feedback and help product management teams to prioritize product features and allocate resources. Small businesses choose to focus on a specific feature while large enterprises such as SaaS companies tend to identify multiple potential features to work on.
Don’t forget that collecting qualitative feedback from customers means receiving support requests to add a wide variety of product features. However, your product team must rely on important metrics to determine the product features that your users love.
Feature prioritization doesn’t only help businesses to use their resources in an efficient manner but also enables the product team to prioritize feature requests that encourage customer loyalty.
Feature Prioritization with NPS® for Customer Success
Although customer data gathered through NPS® surveys is quantitative, it allows your business to leverage it to identify its main priorities. All product management teams want quick wins and that only happens when you know your top priority at any given time. That’s exactly what NPS® results deliver.
NPS® saves product teams time since it allows them to create quick product roadmaps by adding every prioritized feature request and fleshing it out. This helps the business add features their customers love and reduce churn. Here is how to use customer feedback to identify the feature requests that deserve a priority response.
Step 1: Categorize Feature Requests Gathered Through Customer Feedback
One of the most effective ways to achieve customer satisfaction is to give them the opportunity to tell your business what they need and expect from you.
Adding a comment text box with the NPS® survey question enables you to collect feature requests that allow you to create an effective and detailed product roadmap.
Once you have the data, go through the feature requests to sort them into different categories. Just engaging in this process enables you to identify what makes your customers love your product versus what leaves them feeling disappointed. For each feature request, add a category tag such as “Performance”, “User-Friendliness”, and “New Features”.
When you gather feedback and organize it with a hands-on approach, you must see patterns in customer feedback. The relative prioritization of different features already happens in your head and all you need to do is to prioritize feature requests through quantification.
You don’t necessarily have to make the most requested feature the top priority. There are other factors that you must take into consideration including financial viability, cost-versus-benefit analysis, and required duration to deliver the feature.
Step 2: Conduct Detailed Analysis
Your evaluation to prioritize features must depend on both quantitative and qualitative factors. The volume of certain feature requests is a practical indication. However, it isn’t the only one. For example, your most requested feature is in the “User-Friendliness” category but overall “Performance” is where your product lacks the most.
This is where it becomes important to prioritize features based on the bigger picture that takes subjective product research, competition analysis, rate of churn, customer satisfaction, overall impact, and other factors into account.
The most effective way to prevent false feature prioritization is to increase the sample size of your data as much as possible. The large the sample size, the lesser the margin of error. Do not forget that your team’s ability to address a particular feature request is also a critical consideration.
Step 3: Act on Customer Feedback
After categorization and prioritization, it is time to act. Based on time and budget restraints, come up with a viable and agile product strategy. It is not all about adding new features but improving and enhancing existing products to make your existing customers feel valued.
As a product manager, you must ensure that your development team has all the tools and resources they need to get the job done. Apart from that, give them the confidence and keep collecting feedback from customers as you build new features and enhance your product based on data.
NPS® For Product Features: Final Thoughts
Collecting honest and objective customer insights is one of the most important processes in product management.
To do so, organizations utilize surveys to encourage consumers to contribute their opinion and observations about their products. While this is beneficial to some degree, it is an insufficient technique to evaluate feedback from the users.
Instead of implementing an extra UX element that your users may or may not use, you have to develop and build a culture of criticism and involvement inside your product; an ecosystem that welcomes users to communicate their experience and narrative in the simplest method possible.
This is the only option to ensure that you connect with your audience and obtain fair responses.